


Calamitatis et Miseriae

by wizardslexicon



Category: Doukutsu Monogatari | Cave Story
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-10
Updated: 2014-02-10
Packaged: 2018-01-11 19:50:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1177211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wizardslexicon/pseuds/wizardslexicon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A brief, historical look into the life of a witch doomed to misery, who found a path to light.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Calamitatis et Miseriae

A woman with brown, leathery skin  cradled her newborn child in her strong arms, rocking her softly and cooing. The child’s eyes were as red as the War-Bringer in the sky above, and as the witch-woman held her daughter, she crooned the babe’s name through dry lips: _Misery_.

Centuries later, when historians laid records the life that baby would some day grow to lead on tables in front of them like the paper viscera, they would shake their heads and say that destiny itself had ordered her footsteps. From the moment her own mother whispered Misery into her soft, wet hair, she had been fated to walk a path of misery and doom for all living creatures. Others would claim that she was hobbled by that name, and stooped to a life of drudgery in the way one would by way or self-fulfilling prophecy.

A considerably smaller sect claim that the witch Jenka possessed a Sight beyond those granted most humans, and gave Misery the only gift that she could: the gift of knowing the path that lay before her, that she might not break under the strain of immortal suffering.

Whatever force guided the Sky Witch, it was a capricious and flighty one.  As a child, frolicking in the thin oxygen of the Island with eyes as red as blood, with magic seeming limitless at her footsteps and her demonic uncle’s power in the very earth her pale toes curled into, her future seemed as unfettered as her floating home.

Of course, her joy came at the price of fear for others, and there are records kept to this day detailing the many monstrous creatures her hands and magics fashioned, pushing the fragile Mimiga population back to a single cave system. Grasstown’s fall was a direct consequence of her pubescent love of tropical systems, and the last Mimiga to visit that forlorn place was Arthur the Hero.

In due time, Misery played the tempter to Balrog, offering him the sweet apple of Ballos’ mad rage. She held in her bosom both the pride of Adam and the inquisitive sweetness of Eve, and never dreamed that the serpent might strike the hand that strayed too near. So the folly of a girl whose birthright was disaster ended up being oppression and hell for all life on the Island as her Demon Crown passed from owner to owner.

There is a curious resonance, of course, between Misery’s cursed bloodline and the powers that cast her into bondage. Red eyes, red flowers, and a single crimson orb in the eye of her mother’s mad brother, a single point of rage embedded in the crown so many mad creatures wore. It is possible that Ballos was only able to fashion the crown because the insanity in his brain tissues and the rage in his frothing red blood resonated with his titanic powers, and that similarly Balrog and Misery could only be tied to it through that same bond.

The only possible conclusion is that Jenka needed only to see the red eyes of her sweet-faced daughter to know that her fate would be to suffer. The way before her, you see, had been prepared.

Indulge a small aside: humans were never meant to reach the floating Island. It was torn from the Earth by Jenka for that explicit purpose: to separate Ballos, and the bright flowers that grew from his anger, from the powers of men. It is only natural that one day Man’s curiosity would take it to that floating land, but the message its removal sent could not have been clearer: let us alone.

However, politics ruled reason then as it has ever, and the Powers That Be determined the destruction of all Red Flowers and Mimigas capable of eating them to be of utmost importance.

The greatest minds of that day made special robotic soldiers, a veritable legion, to carry out perfect genocide on the Mimigas. Hidden inside this army was the hope of humanity: two armed reconnaissance scouts, codenamed “Curly Brace” and “Quote”, who had been given extraordinary and expensive modifications. Their mission: to destroy Halda and his Crown. They failed; for what reason, we do not know. Curly Brace woke from her coma after seven years of stasis, and Quote took ten. Near the end of that span of time, the United Nations endeavored to send scientists to discover the state of the Island, and, secretly, the fate of the emissaries previously sent there.

When the Sakamotos and Fuyuhiko Date arrived on the Island, they knew what to expect: sentient lupines, a small, insular family of witches, and a variety of fauna only possible on an evolutionarily isolated environment with magic in the very ground. They did not expect the treachery to come from within their own number. Fuyuhiko Date’s seizure of the Demon Crown marks the single greatest danger to humanity ever presented, and the only regulatory forces that existed to limit his rise were a rocket scientist, her clumsy young son, and her prepubescent daughter. Their failure was an inevitability, and several members of their team were turned to Mimiga by the Crown’s power.

That power, of course, being Misery, whose manipulation of living fats and flesh is legendary even in our age of science. The Demon Crown granted a terrifying range of abilities, but perhaps control of that scion of bitterness was the greatest of them. A witch with both youth and power is to be greatly feared, and the physical powers of the symbiotic soldier Balrog made a nigh-unstoppable combination.

Quote, hero of humanity, spared her life in his final fulfillment of his mission, though reportedly he carries to this day the blade of a Mimiga she slew. Freed from her chains of bondage, Misery’s life changed more drastically than any figure in history.

She reshaped her monsters to creatures that aided Mimigas in the reclamation of lands that were always theirs, shutting herself away in the ruined laboratories of the Red Doctor when their work was done, and in the end bore three children: three witch children named Joy, Hope, and Charity. Their eyes are a rich, albeit reddish brown. Perhaps Misery has seen in the future what her own mother wished so desperately for her to finally gain: peace.


End file.
